Add Mesh Renderer and Mesh Filter to Terrain?

[Kaori]

Is there a way I can add a Mesh Renderer and Mesh Filter to a Gaia Terrain in order to use Mesh Baker to bake everything into one Mesh so I can export everything including trees, flowers, etc into ONE mesh?

[Bryan]

There is already a way to do this. 
Please go to window - procedural worlds - Gaia - Gaia Manger. 
Then go to the advanced section - and tools. 

Then click on the Gaia Mesh Exporter. 
Then you can export your terrain into a mesh. 

 

 

[Kaori]

@Bryan the problem is it wont save all the Flora, trees, etc. It just saves the terrain. I need all shader QUALITY ( not shaders themselves ), intact. Which is why I have to bake it straight into the mesh. In order to keep the quality of the textures & materials.

[Bryan]

If you can do it on a normal Unity terrain you should be able to do with a Gaia Terrain. 
We are still using the normal Unity terrain system just with all of our stuff on top of it. 
I was able to add one not sure exactly if thats what you needed: 

 

[Kaori]

@Bryan yea that looks like its what i need. in order to bake the meshes, mesh baker requires both a mesh renderer and mesh filter.

[Peter]

Hi @Kaori the closest you can get to this is to use the Terrain Mesh Exporter / Converter as suggested by Bryan. It can convert the trees to game objects so they can be baked, but it cannot convert grasses / terrain details.
What are you trying to achieve with baking everything, including grasses, into a single mesh?
If this is done for performance reasons, note that baking everything into a single mesh does not necessarily always increase performance, as you will create one "mega-mesh" that can not be frustum culled or occlusion culled anymore. You will also lose draw distance and LODs on trees and grasses, which will tank your performance (all trees and grasses would always be drawn as part of your mega-mesh).
There will also be a lot of issues with rendering etc. as e.g. the terrain and grasses use special shaders that might not work  anymore in the baked mesh.

[Kaori]

@Peter Well I don't need the grass, but i DEFINITELY need the detail on the terrain itself.

[Peter]

On 8/13/2022 at 6:57 AM, Kaori said:

Well I don't need the grass, but i DEFINITELY need the detail on the terrain itself.

Then you would need an alternative shader that can display splatmap texturing on that mesh. If you intend to bake the trees, objects etc. into the same mesh as well this might become interesting as the different materials on those objects would need to be handled as well.

[Kaori]

@Peter Would this work? https://github.com/sneha-belkhale/shader-bake-unity

[Peter]

@Kaori It might work with terrains, but I think it will not give you any better result than the texture baking Gaia does. Here is an example, this is a mesh terrain made with the Gaia Terrain converter:



Does not look too bad from a distance, but close up you can tell the entire terrain just uses a single texture:



Here is the original terrain for comparison which has much more detail because it uses the unity terrain shader that supports splatmap-based texturing:



I think the tool that you linked will give you similar results like the built-in baking from Gaia. If you need the full details of the individual textures for sand, grass, etc. to be shown on your export, you would need a shader that works on a mesh and supports that.

[Kaori]

@Peter any idea where to find one? ( asset store or not ) ?

[Kaori]

???

[Bryan]

On 8/25/2022 at 9:52 AM, Kaori said:

@Peter any idea where to find one? ( asset store or not ) ?

You might be able to find something on the asset store or even look on git or you may have to custom make one. 

 

[Peter]

@Kaori Our own terrain shader GTS can be used on a mesh, but I cannot 100% recommend it for that purpose yet, as it has not been optimized for meshes yet and will run slower on a mesh terrain than it does on an unity terrain. There are some other terrain shaders on the asset store (just search for "terrain shader") , if you find one that looks good I would recommend to check with their support if it fits your purpose or not.

[Kaori]

@Peter Which Shader in the asset store or on gihub would you recommend for saving ALL the information and baking it into one model?

[Peter]

@Kaori I cannot give a recommendation because I have not used any other terrain shader in that context. I'm still not 100% sure what you are trying to achieve overall - there are terrain shaders that will RUN on meshes instead of unity terrains - if the mesh has the same shape as the terrain it should look the same as if it was an unity terrain. 
If you intend to bake other meshes into that same mesh and then want to be everything rendered by the same shader I would not know of any system that could do that without losing a lot of visual quality..

[Kaori]

@Peter damn.... i was afraid of that.... i need all of it, the flora, etc... to all be 1 mesh with retaining quality when it is saved as a mesh file.